So here’s a hypothetical for all you good people.  Can two people remain friends after one of them tells the other, in all seriousness, that he or she is going to hell?  This is hell the afterlife, as in lake of fire, gnashing of teeth, eternal torment, not like Wal-Mart on “Bring All Your Kids Day” which isn’t so much hell, but more like evidence that evil truly does exist and walks among us.  And this isn’t because one of the two friends is Hitler or Karl Rove or anything, we’re talking about two perfectly nice, social, even very helpful and caring people.  It’s just that one of them, the one who is allegedly on their way to the everlasting fires of Abbadon, simply does not share the religious beliefs of the other.  Can a friendship survive that?  How might that affect their relationship?

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Comments

Julie

2005-01-19T19:29:02.000Z

If both parties agreed to disagree, and just never bring up the subject, then I think you could certainly continue to be friends.  I’ve been friends with all sorts of people who didn’t agree with my beliefs on a number of issues, and we’d just avoid that topic of conversation.   But if this friend has told you, “you are going to burn in hell if you do not repent and accept my religion as your own”, I don’t know that the friendship can survive.  If your friend is following the credo of their religion, they probably will be trying to convert you constantly, and you may always feel like they have an ulterior motive.  This would put a definite strain on the friendship.  So who is it, huh, you can tell us?

tarv

2005-01-19T19:46:58.000Z

It really is just a hypothetical inspired by events that I heard about recently, and it got me thinking.  Sorry, no dirt.

Tara

2005-02-01T08:41:42.000Z

I knew a guy in High School, he was the only one I knew that played magic, so I gave him my Beta cards when he moved away cause I didn’t need them anymore. Um, that wasn’t the point. The point is that he was some flavor of “Born Again”. I believe he had been “pagan” at some point so I’m sure that helped, but he was decidedly on the Christian side of the fence when he left.

He was absolutely, without question, positive that my lack of faith in The Almighty Spawn of Virgin Mary Christ was going to result in my going to Hell when I died. We were friends. It never got in the way, so that either made him a really good, or really shitty Christian depending on who you ask. We talked religion sometimes, but mostly we just knew what the other person believed.

He was fun to hang out with. He felt that despite my being a godless heathen I was a basically good person, with a hysterically dark sense of humor, and he could handle that. I guess he came from the lead by example crowd, and not the beat heathens with crosses crowd.

So it can work. But I think it’s probably more the exception than the rule. Oh yeah, his name was Reese. See, I didn’t even make him up.